ABSTRACT
At the politico-philosophical roots of the matter were ultimate questions about human rights and duties of states to each other in the international community. Perhaps the most significant distillation from those questions into a material point for the agenda of international legal discussion was the endeavour, which persisted from 1870 right up to 1914, to clarify what were the mutual rights and duties of, on the one side, an invader and occupier, and on the other, an invaded and occupied population. The stigmatisation of particular forms of fighting and of particular weapons innovations as improperly ‘atrocious’ was one of the longest-standing traditions of the laws and customs of war. That, at any rate, is the author summary interpretation of the causes of the German insistence, whenever the matter was brought up in international debate between 1871 and 1914, that they were entitled to requisition from the people in whose territory they were operating all the basic victuals they needed.
